A LONG STORY FOR THE AFTERNOON

2:12pm friday november seventh 2003

so last night I was buying a gift for shar & rich, who are getting married tomorrow. they're registered at this marshall fields place. so I went on there last night, (last minute, yes,) and set up an order.

since I've never ordered from marshall fields, I registered and put in all my information. I went through the whole process, sent it in, and got the page saying "thanks guy, you ordered a quality wedding gift. just sit back and we'll e-mail you a confirmation."

so today I thought I'd look in on it, just to make sure my last-minute gifting worked out. but they wouldn't let me sign into the site. their online "hey guy, you forgot your password?" page wasn't helpful, because it wanted to know the zip code my last order was shipped to. and I don't know what that was, since it was a registry.

so I call customer service, and say "hey guy, I can't log in." and he says "ok guy, what's your e-mail?" and I say "steve@fishbucket.com, guy." and he says "what's your name, guy?" and I say "Stephen King, guy. recognize."

then the guy says "I'm sorry, that's not the name on the account." and I said "huh? what's the name?" and he says "I'm sorry I can't tell you that" and he says I should just re-register. I say "ok guy" and go back to the site. then I think "hey wait, this is dumb. I already registered, and I may have already bought the gift." so I called back.

this new guy started with the same thing, "hey there's another name on here." but he was a little more nice about it. because when I inquired some more, he said "well, it seems like it may be a joke name."

at this point, I started to think out the situation. I then noticed that the marshall fields/target site says "powered by amazon.com" or some crap like that.

I then recalled one day last year when I thought it would be funny to change my name to cock king on amazon. (which, incidentally, still remains funny.)

so I laughed and said "uh, does it say cock?"

and he said "I'm going to need you to say the whole name."

and I said "COCK KING?"

and he said "that's it."

so, then he stepped me through the process of changing my name back to Stephen. which I will definitely change back immediately. "Stephen's Gold Box" doesn't have the same ring as "Cock's Gold Box."

so anyway, this had absolutely nothing to do with anything. after this 45-minute phone call I find out the marshall fields site just plain sucks ass, and doesn't work. so I probably never even registered on it. customer service was just looking at my amazon account and wouldn't acknowledge me until I said "cock king."

ok that's it